Armilar co-leads €2 million Pre-Seed round in Veeton
Paris, June 7, 2024 - Veeton, the French generative AI platform that revolutionizes the production of visuals, has announced a 2 million euros pre-seed round led by Founders Future and Armilar Venture Partners, alongside leading business angels such as Xavier Niel and Thibaud Elzière. Veeton's solution, which aims to accelerate the digitalisation of the fashion and e-commerce sectors, has already won over a number of brands and major groups.
Veeton, the French generative AI deeptech platform that is revolutionising the e-commerce and fashion sectors
Founded by 3 alumni from Polytechnique and HEC, Veeton is a French generative AI platform that uses its proprietary models to generate visuals for fashion brands. Their technology generates large-scale photo shoots from a simple flat visual of a garment. Thanks to its solution, Veeton offers its customers the possibility of creating an infinite number of visuals fitting the brands’ garments into all styles and morphologies of models in just a few clicks, producing publish-ready images that are un-distinguishable from traditional photoshoots, at a production cost that is up to 10 times lower than a traditional photoshoot.
The technology developed by Veeton is based on a unique combination of refined foundation models and proprietary models, leveraging a very broad and hard-to-access dataset of training images, that generate, while preserving, the garment‘s properties as it is fitted to a human model.
The start-up's ambition is to play a key role in helping retailers transform and accelerate their digitalisation. Veeton enables retailers to switch their collections online much faster and at a much lower cost than what they normally could, with immediate and easily measurable gains in productivity and operational efficiency.
In addition to an enhanced economic performance for the brands, Veeton enables also a more inclusive approach: thanks to its technology, Veeton’s virtual photoshoots can easily incorporate all types of morphologies and all bodies, enabling brands to offer an ultra-personalised online experience to their customers. This is a major advantage in a rapidly changing market and in a challenging context for the fashion industry. Veeton's solution therefore combines economic performance for the brand with inclusion for customers.
A first round of financing to accelerate the development of its generative AI models
Founded in 2023, Veeton was accelerated by Microsoft's GenAI Startup Program and the BPI's deeptech label that certified its R&D project development. Within a few months, the start-up has already won over premium brands and major groups. It is currently in discussions with several e-commerce and fashion players in France and abroad to roll out its technology.
This 2 million euros round of funding was led by Founders Future and Armilar Venture Partners, alongside Kima Ventures (Xavier Niel), ZeBox Ventures and a number of leading business angels, including Julien Chaumond (Hugging Face), Xavier Court (Veepee), and Thibaud Elzière (Fotolia), that will enable Veeton to accelerate its technology and product development, recruit new talents in the fields of AI and machine learning, and rapidly expand the marketing of their solution on a larger scale in France and abroad.
Flore Lestrade, CEO and co-founder of Veeton says “in just a few months, we have secured the trust of reference investors and key brands in the fashion industry to develop our generative AI solution. Veeton is a lever for creativity at scale for our partners. We are very proud to bring a solution that combines performance for the brand with inclusion for its customers”
Louis Sautet, Investment Director at Founders Future stated “Veeton's technology is the fruit of several years of research in the laboratories of the world's leading universities. The team has demonstrated an exceptional capacity for execution, developing an ultra-high-performance technical base in record time, with concrete applications and rare traction for such a young deeptech company.Veeton serves an industry that needs to reinvent its business model to meet the major economic and environmental challenges. We at Founders Future are delighted to be supporting this talented and ambitious team, which is addressing a theme at the heart of our investment thesis”
“The current speed of development and deployment of generative AI technology, coupled with the speed at which startups are developing new products leveraging this technological capability, it has made it more difficult to pick those who have a real chance of changing a given industry, uniquely solving a real-world problem and adding substantial value to their customers in a sustainable way. What we've found at Veeton is a combination of proprietary and powerful generative models with an end-to-end automated data pipeline, all developed in-house by an exceptional and ambitious founding team, which gives Veeton not only a technological edge but also a significant initial advantage in solving inefficiencies in the fashion industry – an industry that is growing rapidly and in demand for greater digitalisation. We feel incredibly privileged to accompany Flore, Christian and Tristan from the beginning of their journey with Veeton,” added Pedro Ribeiro Santos, Managing Partner at Armilar Venture Partners.
About Veeton's founders:
Flore Lestrade : CEO and co-founder of Veeton, is a graduate of the Grande Ecole programme at HEC, where she completed the X-HEC Entrepreneurs master's degree. At the same time, she completed a master's degree in metaphysics and philosophy at the Sorbonne. After working in sales at Doctolib and in Venture Capital at Bpifrance, she co-founded the company Veeton in 2023. She is in charge of sales, finance and strategy.
Tristan François : CSO and co-founder of Veeton, is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique in applied mathematics and computer science. He did a double degree with Télécom Paris in artificial intelligence, where he did a research master's on Virtual Try On and was a research assistant at Polytechnique Montréal. At Veeton, Tristan works mainly on the tech, recruitment and strategy aspects.
Christian Kotait : CTO and co-founder of Veeton is also a graduate of École Polytechnique in applied mathematics and computer science, where he met Tristan François, his future co-founder. He has had a number of research experiences in machine learning, notably at the London Business School (LBS) in the UK. He also completed the X-HEC Entrepreneurs master's programme, where he met Flore, his future co-founder. At Veeton, Christian works mainly on the tech, recruitment and strategy aspects.
About Veeton
Veeton - AI Fashion Imagery: Veeton enables fashion brands to generate large-scale e-commerce photo shoots in just a few clicks. Veeton's AI technology uses a flat photo of the garment to dress any body type, in any pose, for any garment. It enables them to cut their cost per image by up to ten times, accelerate online sales and improve their conversion rate. Find out more on veeton.co.
About Founders Future
Launched in 2018 by Marc Menasé, a French serial entrepreneur and Business Angel, Founders Future is a B Corp-accredited investment company specializing in seed capital, whose mission is to provide the human and financial capital for tomorrow's ambitious and innovative pan-European tech entrepreneurs. Funded primarily by a group of entrepreneurs and prominent families, the organisation manages over €200m in assets, has made 100 investments in 5 years, and supports over 200 entrepreneurs in 12 countries (over 30% of whom are co-founders), including : Lydia, Yuka, 900.care, Memo Bank, Waterdrop, Taster, Omi and Audi-On. Founders Future made a name for itself in 2023 by acquiring Sowefund, a pioneering participative financing platform dedicated to tech and impact through co-investment alongside market professionals. Find us on foundersfuture.com.
About Armilar
Armilar is an early-stage venture capital fund manager with a strong track record of backing founders of digital startups through the entire journey from inception to exit. Based in Lisbon, Portugal, Armilar has more than two decades of international investment experience and close to €500 million of assets under management. We are an early-stage venture capital fund manager with a strong track record of backing founders of digital startups through the entire journey from inception to exit. We follow a "tech at the core" investment theme, looking for exciting opportunities that are based in leading-edge technology across a range of sectors. Find out more at armilar.com.
